Q1. Why did
you choose to work at Little Treasures?
-
I came from a previous job that I was not
very happy with. I actually applied twice to Little Treasures. I applied once
for possibly even the same job, I interviewed, and they liked me but I was
their second choice, but they kept my resumé. They said they liked me but their
first choice was somebody who previously worked for them so they knew them
better. And about a year later, they called me back and said the person that
they hired decided to retire/quit, and then they said ‘We still had your resumé
on file and we really liked you. We want to know if you’re interested.’ And at
the time, I knew who they were, since they had a lot of developments here, some
of them were Little Treasures. They also did a lot of philanthropic work that I
liked. They did a lot of work outside of the business that they were in, that
they had their hands on. I was interested in that. Also, after meeting with the
people that I would report to, I think people make a big difference in where
you work. I liked who my future boss would be, and I liked who my future peers
would be. SO that kind of made me feel better about saying yes to them because
where I was, I wasn’t happy. The boss and the coworkers were a lot to do with
the situation. And the location was very nice.
~ How
long have you been working there?
-
I have been working there for 4 years.
Q2.
What do you like most about your job?
-
The people that I work with, and my boss. The
boss that I have, she’s a woman, and she’s one of the few female bosses I’ve had
in my lifetime. I think I’ve only had 2 female bosses, everyone else I’ve
reported to was a male. Nothing against male bosses, but I’ve always heard a
stigma against female bosses. But the two that I’ve ever had in my life time
have both been really good at trying to be mentors and trying to help you out.
They haven’t been trying to like you know push you down and saying this is
where you are, don’t try to move up the corporate ladder. SO they’ve both been
good. She, her name is also Jess, has also been very helpful with me as I was
just starting at Little Treasures, and as I was having both of my kids. She was
also very helpful as far as telling me how to do stuff, and showing me when she
needs to show me what to do, and then kind of leaving me alone and letting me
work independently when I need to get stuff done.
~ How
about the people you work with?
-
There’s good and bad to the people that I work
with. Everyone is very competent. I think it’s good that everyone is competent,
it’s just that you considering the positions certain people are in you have to
handle people when you don’t think you have to handle people, and so that gets
frustrating. But you work in a professional environment, so you kind of have to
bite your tongue and not get mad at people, and be calm, and be respectful and
follow up when you need to follow up, and kind of remind people when you need
to remind people. But there are other people that I work with that are much
more knowledgeable than I am, and I rely on them to help me kind of figure out
stuff as I’m working and as I’m doing my job so there’s good and bad to the people
that I work with.
Q3.
What’s your main focus of your job on a daily basis?
-
I work on both the corporate accounting
side of Little Treasures as well as the payroll side. So I do both for the
payroll side because Horsham is headquarters for Little Treasures. On the
Payroll side, I deal with their general ledger and after all the payroll has
been processed, like the accounting side of payroll, for all of the divisions
they have around the country. And on the corporate accounting side, I deal with,
so I don’t deal with the day to day, like I don’t know where Little Treasures
has homes and I don’t know what they’re building at any given time, but for
their home building, everybody reports to a controller or president in every
little division that they have all around the country. So I deal with the
overall accounting. So like on their, I kind of work with I guess more of a broad
based accounting, and where my boss is like the AVP of corporate accounting. So
she works with the home building side. We work with all of the accounting for
those states, I don’t know what their each individual stuff is.
Q4.
Can you walk me through your typical day?
-
I guess it depends on the time of of year.
Our Year-End is at the end of October, so I’m actually going back to work right
at the end of the year. SO normally on a given day, I would probably have to check
my email and see what people have questions on. Usually there are some
controllers that have questions on various payroll items, like if something has
been charged to their account, like why has it been charged, and troubleshoot some
of those questions. Once I kind of go through some of that, I usually have a
couple of things to work on as far as projects are concerned. Like we have one
of the major projects that I think we are working on has to do with our leases.
Little Treasures leases a lot of buildings and equipment for various projects
and for their actual offices in various states. So we’re kind of dealing with accounting
law changes that are coming up that are going to be put into effect at the end
of this year or end of next year. So now we have to change the way we are accounting
for these leases. So that‘s like a big endeavor, because not only do we have to
worry about where the leases are in the state of Pennsylvania, but we have to
figure out where the leases are in all of the states we are in. a lot of it is
being accounted for somewhere. It’s just getting all of that information and
putting it into one database and figuring out you know what the new laws are.
Is it a 5 year lease, is it a 3 year lease. It’s a lot of intricate, boring
stuff that we need to now figure out like what is it all that we have, and
where is it, and does it need to be accounted for, or can we just put it in a footnote,
or do we need a giant spreadsheet that tells you where and how long it is. So that’s
like a big project that we’ve been working on with leases. Outside of that, my
daily stuff if the payrolls for any given week or biweekly pay are taken care
of, I look into we have a matrix that kind of tells us all about our accruals,
so I kind of maintain the matrix there. I handle, on a quarterly basis, we have
quarterly reporting that we have to do, so I handle all of the quarterly
reporting. And if there’s anything, on a monthly basis, that I can update or
keep track of, we try to maintain those records, just so that at the end of any
quarter I’m not bombarded by things that I have to ask questions about. A lot
of it is me just asking questions to somebody about something. You know whether
it’s somebody in benefits, whether it’s somebody in accounting department in another
division, whether it’s to another AVP. A lot of it is just double checking work,
asking questions, or doing my work and kind of getting feedback on what I’ve
done. A lot of it is just excel, a lot of it’s a spreadsheet here and there, and
trying to figure out what the spreadsheet means and how to either make sense of
it or how to create a new one so that you can understand what you’re doing.
~ So
do you use Excel more or Quickbooks or anything?
-
We use Excel. Excel is probably what we use
the most of. I feel like quickbooks is more, I used it more when I did Tax
Accounting at my old job. We used Quickbooks more then when we had to maintain
other people’s accounting records. We don’t necessarily use it. A lot of it is
just Excel and I think they wanted to introduced OneNote, but I’m not sure how
they want to incorporate that. It can be useful when you have big projects
where you have spreadsheets and you have notes you wanna take, and if you have
new software that they‘re trying to set up or create. Majority of my work
though, if it’s not on Excel, then it’s on their Accounting software. We use
like a really old software to maintain any journal entries we have, we throw it
into the software, so it kind of maintains our records, and we can do our
reporting off of the software. If I needed to create something where we needed
to manipulate the data, that’s what I use Excel for.
Q5.
Who do you communicate with within your company? What are their job roles?
-
So, I communicate with my boss (the AVP of
corporate accounting). I also communicate with various controllers in all of
the divisions that we have within the company, and we have about 20-25
divisions and each division is like a region of the country. I have to
communicate with all of them because the controllers usually have either the
information that I need, or questions for me to answer regarding daily accounting
work. I also communicate with the AVP of payroll accounting. And everybody
higher up than them, so basically anyone controller and higher: AVPs, regional
presidents, because we have not just one AVP and not just one VP, assistant VP,
etc. It’s very rare that I deal with project managers. Usually the project
managers should report to the controllers and then the controllers would report
to me.
~ Do
you have other people working for you? Or as an accountant?
-
For me? No. So even though I am a senior accountant,
I am at the same level as the AVP of Payroll. Because she and I would both
report to the AVP of Corporate Accounting. I’m not sure how the Reporting tree
works out and how I am at the same level as her, but that’s how it is.
Q6.
Do you work directly with the clients?
-
No, if a client is the person buying a
house then no.
~ Anyone
outside of the company?
-
I don’t work with anyone outside the
company.
Q7.
What are some of the positive experiences you’ve had at work?
-
I would say, it’s a good work environment.
It’s a place where I am genuinely happy to go into work, not a place where I would
say I dread going to. So that in and of itself makes me happy. A lot of people I
know talk to me about how they go to work and they dread it and they hate it
and its just, I was in that situation at my old job, I prefer where I am. So,
every day is a new learning experience. Even though a lot of my job is doing the
same thing over and over again, I think my boss is good at picking up when I
get bored. So, when she has a new project,
or when she has something that’s different and would be of interest to try and
tackle, she’s good at trying to delegate jobs and delegate work out. Granted it’s
all accounting work so I don’t know exciting it really can be. After a while,
it gets very mundane. She’s really good at trying to even out the work to more
than one person reporting to her. Everyone at work is genuinely nice. Everybody
is supportive and trying to help you out. No one is trying to look out for #1.
They’re all trying to make sure you can get what you need to get done and
always willing to help out if you need the help.
~ Any negative experiences?
-
I don’t want to say negative experiences,
but downsides yes. There are downsides to every job. The downsides to my job is
that every body expects you to cater to them first or answer them first. So if
you have 4 people asking you for 4 different things, every body wants them to
be priority #1, whereas I may have like 5 other things on my to do list for the
day. And if I don’t get back to them, you know we live in an age where
everything is instantaneous with email, we have IMs at work, and we have ways
that people can skype with us and check in, they can call us no matter where
they are in the country. I could get an email at 9 am and if by 11 am I haven’t
answered them, there’s the follow up of ‘Hey where are you?’; whereas, if I sent
that same email to somebody, it’s not so much a priority sometimes. That can
get frustrating. You would think that “Hey I’m HQ and I’m asking you a question,
clearly I need that information for something, why wouldn’t you help me out a little
bit.” That gets frustrating because there’s a double standard there sometimes.
I may not get an email reply by the end of the day because it was so busy, but
if I say the same thing it’s not going to be a priority sometimes. Nobody is rude,
they’re all sometimes passive aggressive, but nobody is rude. So that would be
a downside. Outside of that, on a daily basis, I don’t think I have too many
other negatives. I don’t have to deal with anyone outside of the company, so
the people that I work with, I don’t have too much of a problem with, outside
of everybody wanting to get their stuff in first.
Q8.
What would you say is your most frequently used method of communication?
-
Email or IM or actually even Skype; we have
a Skype network within Little Treasures.
~ So
would IM have like a chatroom for your company?
-
We use Windows Messenger, so we have that
set up. As long as you long are logged into your email, I think Outlook is connected
to Messenger, so anyone can IM you and follow up. You can set it up so that if
you’re busy or you’re in a meeting or something, it’ll show that you’re busy or
in a meeting, but everybody has access to it.
~ So
are your meetings through Skype or in person?
-
Well that depends. Could be just a meeting
in a conference room at the company, it could be a skype conference that I need
to be a part of, it could be a web access that I need to either manage or be a
part of or create. So it depends on what type of meeting it is. As long as it’s
on my calendar, it’ll show on the messenger that I’m in a meeting. I still get
phone calls, but that’s what I use the least during the day. If it’s something I
need to explain to somebody, a lot of times it is just easier to talk to
somebody on the phone because we live in a society where everybody can access
you all the time. They can email you, they IM you because it’s the easiest way
to reach you, but I still think a phone call is a lot easier. You don’t necessarily
know when you talk on email or typing on an IM, you can misconstrue what they’re
typing, what they’re writing, what they’re saying. Whereas, if you pick up the
phone and talk to them, I think it’s easier to get them to understand what you’re
trying to say or what they’re trying to say to you. We do use the phone, but
most of the time I contact them or they contact me through email. Email also helps
you create a backup of evidence, just in case something goes wrong.
Q9.
How has technology helped you with communication within the workplace?
-
Communication is definitely a lot easier
now because of technology, but like I said because everyone can access you now
24/7, they also expect you to answer as quickly as possible. So that can get
frustrating. But when you have other things to do, and you’re not necessarily
considering them a priority, that can get frustrating very quickly. That is
when a phone call is nice to make and just let them know. Or even give them a
call and ask if they could send a follow up email for your message. Email is definitely
helpful because I don’t think I’ve ever had a job where Email wasn’t used. So I
don’t know what it was like before Email, I assume they called each other. I
think it does make your job a lot easier, but at the same time we’re now trying
to move to a digital age where they don’t want to keep digital copies of
everything and everything should be digitized. So, that’s easy and not easy
because a lot of times, the conversations you have on the phone, I don’t know
how to record that, it’s just my word against yours. And then Email, you need
to make sure to keep really good records of your emails because I am really bad
at still printing out and keeping paper copies of things when I don’t need to
keep paper copies of things. In my head it’s just easier to have a piece of
paper versus when I archive things, I feel like I forget about them. If I have
a piece of paper in a file in my cabinet, that’s just easier for me to
remember. If my boss is like “hey! Remember that conversation we had? Do you
remember what happened?” I remember what happened because I have it in my folder,
not because I kept it archived somewhere.
Q10.
What are some of the written communications/documents you use?
-
A lot of written communications is email. For
my specific job, I don’t need to necessarily, outside of email, need to
document anything that I need to write a report for. Majority of my work is more
numerically based, like Excel. So my work papers are all on Excel and if I need
to describe in detail or explain in detail, that’s usually an attachment along with
it in the email. I don’t think I’ve really used Word very often. I really only
use it if I need to create instructions, like for a template or a worksheet
that we all need to fill out, that might be the only time I need to create a
word document instructions.
~ What
kinds of financial statements do you write?
-
So I do bits and pieces of stuff related to
the balance sheet, and the income statement, and the profit/loss statement. So I
have just a section of stuff like statements and then my coworkers or peers
would have other sections of it. Because the company is so big, they have very
extensive amounts of statements, so I would only have my section.
~ So
everyone sort of works together?
-
Yes, yes
Q11.
Do you find yourself using more verbal or written communication during the work
day?
-
Talking to people more. Does writing
include emails? Then written communication is used more than verbal. Because a
lot of the people I need to communicate with are not necessarily in the
building I am working in. They are most likely in other states, and so emails
are usually the easiest way. So yes, written is actually used more.
Reflection:
All in all, I thought the interview
wasn't too difficult. I found it easy to come up with and ask follow up
questions right away. It also gave me an insight into what my career path would
be like. I had recorded the interview, of course with her permission. Recording
the interview made it so much easier because I knew I wouldn't be able to get
everything written down right away. The interview took about 45 minutes but it
went really smoothly. We had the interview at her house, so her 4 year old
daughter kept walking in, which was actually pretty funny at the time.
It was interesting to learn that the
company uses Skype and IM to communicate within the company. I never thought
video chat was really used in a company, but since Little Treasures is such a
big company that is spread through out the country, it's one of the best
sources for them to use other than email. The genres that she writes during the day would consist of financial statements, sometimes instructions on how to use something, and most of it is on Excel and Emails. It was also interesting to learn that she doesn't do any communicating with clients or anyone outside of the company.
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